The Signature of All Things

River, pretending to catch fish with her toes; or cutting one of her beautiful shawls in half, in order to share it with a maid who had just complimented it. (“Look, now we each have a bit of the shawl, and so now we are twins!”) Nobody knew what to make of her, but nobody ever chased her away. It was not so much that Retta charmed people; it was merely that fending her off was an impossibility. One had no choice but to submit.
    Retta even managed to win over Beatrix Whittaker, which was a truly remarkable accomplishment. By all reasonable expectations, Beatrix should have detested Retta, who was the very personification of all Beatrix’s deepest fears about girls. Retta was everything Beatrix had raised Alma and Prudence not to be—a powdered, hollow-headed, and vain little confection, who ruined expensive dancing slippers in the mud, who was quick to tears and laughter, who pointed crassly at things in public, who was never seen with a book, and who hadn’t even the sense enough to keep her head covered in the rain. How could Beatrix ever embrace such a creature as that?
    Anticipating this as a problem, Alma had even tried to hide Retta Snow from Beatrix at the beginning of their friendship, fearing the worst should the two ever encounter each other. But Retta was not easily hidden, and Beatrix was not easily deceived. It had taken less than a week, in fact, before Beatrix demanded of Alma one morning at breakfast, “Who is that child , with that parasol , who is always darting about my property of late? And why do I always see her with you ?”
    Reluctantly, Alma was forced to introduce Retta to her mother.
    “How do you do, Mrs. Whittaker,” Retta had begun, properly enough, even remembering to curtsey, if perhaps a bit too theatrically.
    “How do you do, child?” Beatrix had replied.
    Beatrix was not seeking an honest answer to this question, but Retta took the query seriously, pondering it a bit before answering. “Well, I shall tell you, Mrs. Whittaker. I am not at all well. There has been a dreadful tragedy in my household this morning.”
    Alma looked on in alarm, helpless to intervene. Alma could not imagine where Retta was tending with this line of conversation. Retta had been at White Acre all day, cheerful as can be, and this was the first Alma had heard of a dreadful tragedy in the Snow household. She prayed that Retta would stop speaking, but the girl pushed on, as though Beatrix had urged her to continue.
    “Only this morning, Mrs. Whittaker, I suffered the most flurried attack of nerves. One of our servants—my little English maid, to be precise—was in utter tears at breakfast, and so I followed her into her room after the meal was over, to investigate the origins of her sorrow. You shall never guess what I learned! It seems her grandmother had died, exactly three years ago, to this very day !Upon learning of this tragedy, I was put into a fit of weeping myself, as I’m certain you can well imagine! I must have wept for an hour on that poor girl’s bed. Thank goodness she was there to comfort me. Doesn’t it make you want to weep, too, Mrs. Whittaker? To think of losing a grandmother, just three years ago?”
    With the mere memory of this incident, Retta’s large green eyes filled with tears, and then spilled over.
    “What a great heap of nonsense,” Beatrix rebuked, emphasizing each word, while Alma flinched at every syllable. “At my age, can you begin to imagine how many people’s grandmothers I have seen die? What if I had wept over each one of them? A grandmother’s death does not constitute a tragedy, child—and somebody else’s grandmother’s death from three years past most certainly should not bring on a fit of weeping. Grandmothers die , child. It is the proper way of things. One could nearly argue that it is the role of a grandmother to die, after having imparted, one hopes, some lessons of decency and sense to a younger generation. Furthermore, I suspect you were of little comfort to your maid, who would have been better served hadyou demonstrated for her an example of stoicism and reserve, rather than collapsing in tears across her bed.”
    Retta took in this admonishment with an open face, while Alma wilted in distress. Well, there’s the end of Retta Snow, Alma thought. But then, unexpectedly, Retta laughed. “What a marvelous correction, Mrs. Whittaker! What a fresh way you have of regarding things! You are absolutely in the right! I shall never again